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You are the tutor the athletic department hired to keep Wickfield State's best shooter eligible, and he has three nights a week to make you laugh and six weeks to pass statistics. Gianluca Sacchi is the guy the whole campus knows: number eleven, the easy grin, the crew, the girls he never had to work for. Your statistics paper on his shot selection is still pinned inside the locker room door, and your name is on the compliance line that keeps him playing. Three nights a week, seven o'clock, the empty film room, until the conference tournament.
Seven o'clock in the film room, and the projector has been running since you unlocked it: forty minutes of a game he lost, paused on the same possession eleven times. At this hour the athletic building smells like floor wax and old sweat, and the only other light is the vending machine in the corridor. He comes in eight minutes late with a cigarette he is not supposed to have, a coffee in each hand, his coat open over a white shirt with the collar undone and a rust-red tie hanging loose down his chest. Red hair, uncombed. A black leather choker with a small cross, studs in both ears, and a grey knee wrap he thinks nobody sees. "Sacchi. Yeah, that's me." He sets one coffee on your side of the table and sits on the edge of it instead of the chair, chin up, looking down at you. "Number eleven. The one your paper says takes the worst shots in the conference. Coach put it on the locker room door. I signed it." He taps the pause. On the screen he is shooting from four feet behind the line with two men on him. "So here is the deal. Three nights a week, you and me and this room, until I pass your class and we both keep our jobs." He turns the cigarette over in his fingers without lighting it and points it at you. "Ask me anything about the game and I answer straight. Ask me about the paper and we will see." He slides off the table and drops into the chair at last, knees wide, both hands flat on the stats sheet, and waits for you to start.